Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Mosul residents enjoy calmer lives under ISIS control, at least for now

Vice reports: When the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) overran Iraq’s second city of Mosul, many feared sectarian massacres and brutal violence from the extremist Sunni militants. As many 500,000 people fled the city on the first day, according to the UN.

Now, many citizens have returned. Instead of imposing its extreme interpretation of Islamic law and carrying out threats of killing Shiites wherever it found them, ISIS has remained more moderate. As a result, it has found support among local residents, some of whom told VICE News that they are happy with life under their new leaders.

At the borders between Iraqi Kurdistan and the newly seized ISIS territory in Northern Iraq, Kurdish peshmerga fighters describe the militants as terrorists and are obviously uncomfortable with their new neighbors.

Nevertheless, on the road from Erbil to Mosul, things have remained quiet between the forces. It’s only 500 yards from the last peshmerga position to the first ISIS checkpoint. While that’s as close to Mosul as it’s sensible to get for an obvious non-Iraqi with a healthy aversion to kidnapping, local residents travel easily between the two territories. Traffic flows both ways and those people going in and out say the militants manning the ISIS checkpoint aren’t ruthlessly hunting down non-Sunnis. A quick glance inside and each car is waved on. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Two weeks after Sunni insurgents overran northern Iraq’s biggest city Mosul, shrines lie smashed, non-Sunnis have fled and armed men have warned women not to walk in the streets unescorted.

Residents who welcomed the expulsion of the Shi’ite-led government’s soldiers and police from the mostly Sunni city are now asking what life will bring under the al Qaeda offshoot calling the shots, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Ahmed Khalil, an engineering student in Mosul, said the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had felt like an occupying force, and he was glad to see it go. But the rise of ISIL has put him on guard.

“The first impression was like the prison gates were broken, and we started to taste freedom,” Khalil said.

“But after the spread of too many armed groups, including al Qaeda, I’ve gotten cautious about what’s next.”

His concerns were repeated in over a dozen interviews with Mosul residents, although most said ISIL had acted with more restraint than in Syria. Men still smoke in the streets, women drive cars, and no one can confirm any beheadings or floggings.

Yet there has been plenty to presage a different future. After Mosul’s fall, ISIL issued a “city charter” outlining its vision: Tobacco, drugs and alcohol would be banned, “pagan shrines” destroyed, and women were to dress modestly and stay home.

Last week militants got to work, smashing statues of musicians and poets and desecrating the tomb of a 12th century philosopher. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS was built like a corporation with little need for foreign investors

McClatchy reports: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria sprang from a largely self-funded, corporation-style prototype whose resilience to counterterrorism operations was proven by the time Abu Bakr al Baghdadi assumed command in 2010.

The militant group Baghdadi inherited had in place a sophisticated bureaucracy that was almost obsessive about record-keeping. Its middle-managers detailed, for example, the number of wives and children each fighter had, to gauge compensation rates upon death or capture, and listed expenditures in neat Excel spreadsheets that noted payments to an “assassination platoon” and “Al Mustafa Explosives Company.” Income from the Sunni Muslim militants’ looting of Shiite Muslim-owned property was recorded as “spoils.”

By the time Baghdadi took charge, the group even had begun siphoning a share of Iraq’s oil wealth, opening gas stations in the north, smuggling oil and extorting money from industry contractors — enterprises that Baghdadi would build on and replicate as he expanded operations across the border into Syria, ultimately breaking from his al Qaida roots and declaring himself emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Now Baghdadi’s ISIS has seized control of much of Iraq’s Sunni provinces, is consolidating its hold on two provinces in eastern Syria and is circling the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, as 300 newly dispatched American military advisers arrive in Iraq to assess what the United States can do to stop its advance.

Insurgent records suggest that the United States will find it difficult to rout an organization whose structure and attention to detail allowed it to prosper even during the toughest U.S. counterterrorism efforts of the last decade. U.S. officials believed, incorrectly, that the group had been vanquished.

This rare, in-depth look into the seed money and organizational structure of the militant organization comes from the Department of Defense’s classified Harmony Database, a repository of more than a million documents gathered from Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones. Some 200 Iraq-related documents — personal letters, expense reports, membership rosters — were declassified in the past year through West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center for the use of RAND Corp. researchers looking into the evolution of al Qaida in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq, the precursors to ISIS. Some analysis of the documents, which haven’t yet been published, was discussed with McClatchy to lend context to the current crisis.

The documents provide a cautionary tale as the Iraqi government pleads for U.S. military assistance to beat back ISIS’s brazen new campaign. The records reveal that previous incarnations of ISIS have shown an extraordinary ability to regroup even after military defeats. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS seizes control of Iraq’s entire western frontier

The New York Times reports: The Sunni militant extremists who have seized a broad area of Iraq extended their control on Monday to the country’s entire western frontier, having secured nearly all official border crossings with Syria and the only one with Jordan, giving them the semblance of the new independent state that they say they intend to create in the region.

With the seizure of the Jordan crossing, which militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria first assaulted late Sunday night, the Iraqi military defenses crumpled, as they have in other battlegrounds in the western and northern parts of the country over the past two weeks. ISIS control of the Jordan border raised the risks that its insurgency could menace not just Syria and Iraq, but Jordan and Saudi Arabia, two important American allies.

The border seizure came as Secretary of State John Kerry made an emergency visit to Baghdad for consultations with Iraqi leaders on the need to bridge the country’s deepening sectarian splits and form a new unity government that can halt the ISIS insurgency. That is an enormous challenge, given the polarizing effects of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite whose autocratic tendencies have increasingly been a worry for American officials. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: Sunni rebels in Iraq say they have fully captured the country’s main oil refinery at Baiji, north of Baghdad.

The refinery had been under siege for 10 days with the militant offensive being repulsed several times.

The complex supplies a third of Iraq’s refined fuel and the battle has already led to petrol rationing.

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The beginning of the disintegration of the state of Iraq?

The Washington Post reports: The 300 U.S. advisers authorized to assist the Iraqi security forces will find an army in crisis mode, so lacking in equipment and shaken by desertions that it may not be able to win back significant chunks of territory from al-Qaeda renegades for months or even years, analysts and officials say.

After tens of thousands of desertions, the Iraqi military is reeling from what one U.S. official described as “psychological collapse” in the face of the offensive from militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The desperation has reached such a level that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is relying on volunteers, who are in some cases receiving as little as a week’s military training, to protect his ever-shrinking orbit of control.

“Over time, what’s occurred is that the Iraqi army has no ability to defend itself,” said Rick Brennan, a Rand Corp. analyst and former adviser to U.S. forces in Iraq. “If we’re unable to find ways to make a meaningful difference to the Iraqi army as they fight this, I think what we’re looking at is the beginning of the disintegration of the state of Iraq.” [Continue reading…]

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Maliki’s uncertain future

Reuters reports: In eight years in power, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki has never faced such a threat. Swathes of his country have fallen to Sunni insurgents. Rivals are seeking his downfall. Foreign sponsors in Washington and Tehran are wary or worse. Even friends are openly contemplating his demise.

Yet the virtuoso player of Iraq’s political game shows no sign of surrendering any time soon.

His opponents say Maliki is responsible for the vehemence of the insurgency because of policies that alienated Sunnis, pushing tribes to back a revolt by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which seized the main northern city Mosul on June 10 and has since marched virtually unopposed towards Baghdad.

Washington, while publicly saying it has no plan to pick Iraq’s rulers, has made clear it wants more inclusive leadership in Baghdad. Iran, which has widespread influence among Iraq’s Shi’ite parties, has played its cards close but has conspicuously avoided rallying around Maliki.

Even members of Maliki’s own bloc now concede that the combative 64-year-old Islamist may need to go, if rival Shi’ite groups as well as Sunnis and Kurds are to be assembled into a new ruling coalition.

“Iraq after June 10 is not the same as before. Everything has changed,” said a senior member of Maliki’s coalition on condition of anonymity. “Everything is on the table … If the others insist they will only go forward if Maliki is not prime minister, we are ready to discuss it.”

“Maliki will be included in this decision-making and the transition must be smooth. I think he has an open mind about it, and is weighing options. He understands it might come to that,” the senior ally said. A second member of Maliki’s coalition confirmed there was talk of replacing him from within. [Continue reading…]

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Blame Assad above all others for the rise of ISIS

Alex Rowell writes: In the week since Al-Qaeda spinoff the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) brought Iraq back into international headlines by seizing around a third of the country in a matter of hours, there has understandably been a great deal of soul-searching and hair-pulling as to how a group that was supposed to have been “decimated,” in a country that was supposed to be last decade’s headache, has once again managed with just a few hundred men to humiliate an army many times its size and generally outfox the entire world.

Fingers have been hastily pointed in every direction, with culprits found ranging from the timeless “conspiracy” (in the Iraqi prime minister’s words) to Tony Blair (who took to his website Saturday to cantankerously declare his complete innocence of all charges). An increasingly widespread claim – appealing perhaps because of its ring of an ironic morality tale about imperial folly – has it that ISIS’ growth is in fact the doing of the West’s closest but most duplicitous Arab allies, the oleaginous Gulf dictatorships, who have done to us once again what they’ve been doing since they backed the Afghan Mujahideen that nurtured Bin Laden in the 1980s. Will we ever learn?

Lost in this din, driven more by the grinding of old axes than dispassionate consideration of the evidence, is the obvious fact that one man has contributed vastly more than anyone else to getting ISIS where it is today: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. [Continue reading…]

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Equipped with Humvees, ISIS clashes with rivals in Syria

Reuters reports: The Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant (ISIL) battled with rival opposition fighters in northern Syria on Sunday, using U.S.-made military vehicles captured from neighbouring Iraq for the first time, a monitoring group said.

ISIL, a splinter group of al Qaeda which wants to set up an Islamic caliphate encompassing both Iraq and Syria, has made rapid gains in Iraq in the past two weeks, taking control of the northern city of Mosul and major border crossings with Syria.

Its advances in Iraq appear to have spurred on the Syrian branch, which is fighting both the army of President Bashar al-Assad and also rival opposition groups such as the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, a more moderate force.

The Sunni Muslim ISIL fighters seized strategic Syrian towns near the Iraqi border from rivals last week.

For the first time, ISIL combatants have been using U.S-made Humvees – four-wheel drive military vehicles – in fighting in northern areas of Syria’s Aleppo province, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The vehicles, which appear to have been seized during ISIL’s recent Iraqi offensive, were used to gain control of villages outside the town of Azaz, close to the Turkish border, it said. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Shiites say driven from homes in Sunni area

The Associated Press reports: The insurgents came at midday, walking across a canal, advancing under cover of mortar fire toward the cluster of three Iraqi villages.

Within eight hours, Shiite residents who fled said the Sunni insurgents had expelled thousands of them from the majority-Sunni province, helped by local Sunnis in neighboring villages.

“You cannot imagine what happened, only if you saw it could you believe it,” said Hassan Ali, a 52-year-old farmer siting in the al-Zahra Shiite mosque, used to distribute aid in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where the displaced had fled, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) away.

“They hit us with mortars and mortars, and the families fled, and they kept hitting us. It was completely sectarian. The Shiites, out,” he said.

The attacks took place on June 16 in the neighboring villages of Chardaghli, Brawchi and Karanaz, as well as a fourth village, Beshir, some 30 miles (50 kilometers) to the north, said the displaced residents. All places were home to Shiite Turkmen, an ethnically distinct minority who speak their own language and are scattered through Iraq.

Over a dozen displaced residents in Kirkuk and the nearby Shiite Turkmen town of Taza Khormato gave The Associated Press near identical accounts of the expulsions. It was not possible, however, to independently confirm the incidents because Sunni insurgents now control of the villages. [Continue reading…]

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Assad and Hezbollah’s land bridge from Iran has been severed by ISIS

Juan Cole writes: With the alleged fall to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria of Qa’im on Saturday, and of Talafar a few days ago, the border between Iraq and Syria has now been effectively erased. A new country exists, stretching from the outskirts of Baghdad all the way to Aleppo. In history, it uncannily resembles the state ruled by Imad ad-Din Zangi (AD 1085 – 1146), a Turkish notable who came to power in 1128 after a Shiite Assassin killed his father. His realms lay between the Abbasid Caliphate on the one hand and the Atabegs of Damascus on the other. Like ISIS, he was not able to take and keep Homs. He also was not able to take Palestine away from the Crusaders, despite a brief alliance for that purpose with Buri of Damascus. ISIS also so far lacks Baghdad or Damascus but like Zangi does have much in between.

The first thing that occurred to me on the fall of Qa’im is that Iran no longer has its land bridge to Lebanon. I suppose it could get much of the way there through Kurdish territory, but ISIS could ambush the convoys when they came into Arab Syria. Since Iran has expended a good deal of treasure and blood to keep Bashar al-Assad in power so as to maintain that land bridge, it surely will not easily accept being blocked by ISIS. Without Iranian shipments of rockets and other munitions, Lebanon’s Hizbullah would rapidly decline in importance, and south Lebanon would be open again to potential Israeli occupation. I’d say, we can expect a Shiite counter-strike to maintain the truck routes to Damascus. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s Khamenei ‘strongly opposed to U.S. interference’ in Iraq

The Washington Post reports: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made remarks Sunday that lessened any remaining possibility of military cooperation between the Islamic republic and the United States in securing Iraq against an onslaught from al-Qaeda-inspired militants.

“We don’t support any foreign interference in Iraq and we’re strongly opposed to U.S. interference there,” Khamenei said at an event with members of Iran’s judiciary, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.

While officials in Washington and Tehran had earlier signaled a willingness to work together to rid the presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the comments from Khamenei show a growing divide between the interests of the long-opposed governments.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said last Saturday that once he knows what the U.S.’s plans are for intervening, his government would “think about cooperation with them in Iraq.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The long lines of Shiite fighters began marching through the capital early Saturday morning. Some wore masks. One group had yellow and green suicide explosives, which they said were live, strapped to their chests.

As their numbers grew, they swelled into a seemingly unending procession of volunteers with rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, backed by mortar crews and gun and rocket trucks.

The Mahdi Army, the paramilitary force that once led a Shiite rebellion against American troops here, was making its largest show of force since it suspended fighting in 2008. This time, its fighters were raising arms against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the Qaeda splinter group that has driven Iraq’s security forces from parts of the country’s north and west.

Chanting “One, two, three, Mahdi!” they implored their leader, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, to send them to battle.

“ISIS is not as strong as a finger against us,“ said one fighter, Said Mustafa, who commanded a truck carrying four workshop-grade rockets — each, he said, packed with C4 explosive. “If Moktada gives us the order, we will finish ISIS in two days.” [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi army kills civilians in Tikrit airstrike, say residents

The Wall Street Journal reports: An Iraqi army airstrike in the country’s north killed at least seven civilians and wounded 12 more, residents said Sunday, further inflaming antigovernment sentiment among the country’s Sunnis that insurgents are thriving on as they continue to take territory.

Iraqi army helicopters fired on civilian cars lined up outside a gas station in the city of Tikrit in the early hours of Sunday morning, residents said, while the government said the only people killed in the attack were 42 insurgents. [Continue reading…]

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Islamic Army of Iraq founder: Iraq must be divided into three separate regions

Ahmad Dabash, a founding leader of the Islamic Army of Iraq that fought the 2003 US invasion, was interviewed by Rudaw, a Kurdish media network.

Rudaw: [T]he Americans came and rid the country of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Do you prefer Saddam’s dictatorship?

Ahmad Dabash: The dictatorship we see today is 10 times worse than Saddam’s dictatorship. It is true that Saddam killed our Kurdish brothers in Halabja and Dujail, but today 10 times that number of people is getting killed.

Rudaw: How come you knew so early on that one dictator was being replaced by another and immediately took up arms against the Americans? Did you have some kind of revelation?

Ahmad Dabash: We are sure that America had come to destroy Iraq with a clear plan. They created the Governing Council, where the Kurds and Sunnis had little representation, and the rest of the power was given to the Shiites. America came and handed Iraq over on a golden plate to Iran. So what we see today is a complete failure of Iraq’s political process, and it will only be solved by giving the country back to its people. Both Iran and America have had a hand in destroying Iraq and leading it to what we see today.

Rudaw: You call this Shiite government dictatorial. And in the past there was a Sunni dictator. Who should the people of Iraq believe? Can both Shiites and Sunnis be dictators?

Ahmad Dabash: The dictatorship of the past cannot be compared to the one of now. I know you Kurds had your own fight against Baghdad then, but today the killing, repression and terror is a hundred times more. And Sunnis didn’t really join the political process because we don’t believe in an illegitimate government. The government in the past 10 years has run on fraud, suppression and terror. Those few Sunnis who joined the process were opportunists. The real representatives of Sunnis were the ones who fought the foreign occupation.

Rudaw: What do the Sunnis want today? A separate region of their own or do they want to run all of Iraq again?

Ahmad Dabash: Today, taking into account the circumstances and the way things are with the population divide, there must be a system of regions. Iraq can stay under one system, but three separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions. There is no better solution than that. What has happened between people in the past 10 years in terms of killing and repression makes it impossible to go back to how things were before 2003. [Continue reading…]

Ahmed Al Attar writes: From the Iraqi government’s perspective, the current situation seems particularly precarious: Fallujah has been an opposition stronghold for months now and is only 40 kilometres from Baghdad airport. Meanwhile, Baquba and Samarra – where clashes between Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish forces have been continuing for days – may both be about to tumble out of control.
An earlier position taken by the US government to only provide direct military assistance in the event of Nouri Al Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, making real political change, has moderated significantly in recent days.

And a recent announcement by Barack Obama to deploy 300 US military advisers in Iraq to assist the Iraqi forces could, if carried out, further destabilise the region. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS was forged inside Syria’s jails

Newsweek reports: Mohammed Al-Saud is under no illusions. “In 2011, the majority of the current ISIS leadership was released from jail by Bashar Al Assad,” he said. “No one in the regime has ever admitted this, or explained why.” Al-Saud, a Syrian dissident with the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, left Syria under threat of arrest in 2011.

Others were not so lucky. In 2006, Syrian Tarek Alghorani was sentenced to seven years in jail for the contents of his blog. Since his amnesty in 2011, he has been an active opponent of the Damascus regime. “There were around 1,500 people in there,” he recalls, outside a sleepy midtown café in Tunis. “There were about ten of us bloggers, around one hundred Kurds and the rest were just normal people. I’d say that, when they went in, around 90 percent were simply normal Muslims.”

“The situation in there was like the middle ages. There were too many people and not enough space. There wasn’t enough water to drink. There wasn’t enough food to eat and what there was would have been ignored by dogs in the street. Torture was an everyday reality. After years in there, all of those people became Salafists and in a bad, bad way.”

His fellow prisoners were members of ISIS. “Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, (founder of the Jihadist group, Jabhat al-Jabhat al-Nusra) was rumored to be there. Mohammed Haydar Zammar, (one of the organisers of the 9/11 attacks) was there. This is where the Syrian part of ISIS was born,” he said.

Alghorani is convinced that members of ISIS were released strategically by Assad. “From the first days of the revolution (in March 2011), Assad denounced the organisation as being the work of radical Salafists, so he released the Salafists he had created in his prisons to justify the claim … If you do not have an enemy, you create an enemy.” [Continue reading…]

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Fractures emerge in ISIS-Baathist alliance as violence sweeps Iraq

The New York Times reports: The violent struggle over Iraq on Saturday consumed cities and towns widely spread over the north and west of the country, with neither the Sunni militants nor the Iraqi army seeming to gain major ground.

The fighting also was one of the first times fissures appeared in the extremist Sunni coalition led by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, with a battle between that group and its Baathist allies killing 17.

In Baghdad, a bomb exploded in a market in the predominantly Shiite Zafaraniya area, killing four shoppers. Three hours later, two men were found dumped nearby, handcuffed and shot to death. The victims were likely to be Sunnis since the area is controlled by Shiite militiamen.

In the insurgent-held city of Tikrit, in Salahuddin Province, the morgue at the hospital reported that it had received 84 bodies of policemen, soldiers and government employees who had been executed. Seven of them had been beheaded, according to an official there, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the insurgents.

In western Anbar Province, two more towns fell to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, near the border town of Qaim, which fell to the rebels on Friday. Reports from officials at the scene said 34 Iraqi soldiers were killed on Friday as hundreds of militants overran Qaim.

A local government leader, Muthana al-Rawi, said the two towns taken Saturday, Ana and Rawaa, fell after troops and police officers fled Qaim and “sleeper cells of the militants showed up to fill the gap and take control over the two towns.”

Eyewitnesses from another border town, Al Waleed, said the Syrian air force had bombed ISIS troops who were trying to attack and capture it, as well. If Al Waleed fell, that would leave the Iraqi government without control of a single border crossing to Syria. [Continue reading…]

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How Iran and America can beat ISIS together

Ben Van Heuvelen writes: If Obama continues to engage with Iraq at arm’s length — mainly through bilateral diplomacy, weapons sales, and a slightly larger training mission — then Iraq’s Shia leaders will learn once and for all that only Iran really has their back. Already, thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps troops have reportedly entered the country through at least two border crossings, and the shadowy Quds Force controls homegrown Shia militias throughout Iraq. In contrast to the feckless Iraqi commanders who fled Mosul, these Iranian forces are disciplined, motivated, and ruthless. They are also likely to stoke the kind of sectarian mistrust from which ISIS draws its strength.

During last decade’s Iraqi civil war, for example, Iran’s proxy militias weren’t just attacking U.S. troops and Sunni militants; they were also conducting systematic campaigns of sectarian revenge killing against Sunni non-combatants. Sunni families in historically heterogeneous areas picked up and fled, eager to avoid a power drill to the forehead.

There is every indication that this pattern has begun to repeat itself now. In the months before the fall of Mosul, scores of Sunnis turned up dead in Baghdad, victims of mass executions. Hundreds of families moved out of their homes in Diyala province due to intimidation. The government has been complicit: Iran-backed militias are now reporting to a special division of Maliki’s office, and in some cases, they are conducting joint operations with government forces. The abuses have apparently escalated recently. For example, on Tuesday in Baquba, the capital of Diyala, 44 Sunni prisoners were found dead in a government-controlled prison with bullet holes in their heads.

Quds Force leaders might not be ordering these atrocities directly, but they do appear to take a “boys will be boys” attitude toward horrific violence. As long as they do, it’s difficult to imagine that any Sunni leader will be eager to collaborate with a government that also partners with sectarian killers.

There’s no guarantee the U.S. can wield enough leverage to affect Iran’s behavior, or that Iran exerts enough control over the militias to calm the sectarian frenzy. For this reason, Obama appears disinclined to order air strikes unless the conditions exist for political progress. The nightmare scenario is that the U.S. could find itself bombing Sunni-majority cities while Shia militias run rampant through Baghdad. The war would become increasingly sectarian, with America taking sides. Any military victory would be fleeting. ISIS would no longer need to produce propaganda videos, because the atrocities reported on CNN would be enough to radicalize the next generation of jihadis. [Continue reading…]

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Secret U.S. plan to aid Iraq fizzled amid mutual distrust

The Wall Street Journal reports: Amid growing signs of instability in Iraq, President Barack Obama authorized a secret plan late last year to aid Iraqi troops in their fight against Sunni extremists by sharing intelligence on the militants’ desert encampments, but devoted only a handful of U.S. specialists to the task.

So few aircraft were dedicated to the program, which also faced restrictions by the Iraqis, that U.S. surveillance flights usually took place just once a month, said current and former U.S. officials briefed on the program.

Instead of providing Iraqis with real-time drone feeds and intercepted communications from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the militant group that has overrun parts of Iraq, U.S. intelligence specialists typically gave their Iraqi counterparts limited photographic images, reflecting U.S. concerns that more sensitive data would end up in Iranian hands, these officials said.

Islamist extremists ISIS released a video on Friday targeting Western Muslims, encouraging them to give up their Western lives and join the jihadi struggle. Via The Foreign Bureau, WSJ’s global news update.

Overseas problems continue to weigh on President Obama as Iraq descends into disarray. Obama promised that no combat troops would be deployed in Iraq, but he has sent 300 military advisers to the region. The president now must decide whether to back Nouri al-Maliki, the current prime minister, or demand a new leader.

Political and security sensitivities for leaders in both countries led the U.S. to move cautiously to secretly set up the so-called fusion intelligence center in Baghdad. But Mr. Obama’s announcement Thursday that the U.S. will deploy up to 300 military advisers and set up two joint operations centers shows the extent to which U.S. and Iraqi leaders are racing to catch up to an ISIS threat they had already identified but were slow to counter. [Continue reading…]

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17 ISIS suspects held in Beirut for suspected assassination plot

The New York Times reports: Lebanese security forces arrested 17 men in two Beirut hotels on Friday on suspicion that they were plotting to assassinate a prominent Lebanese Shiite leader, a government official said, describing an attack that could inflame sectarian conflict across the Middle East.

Investigators are exploring whether the men intended to kill Nabih Berri, the speaker of Parliament, who has been a leading Shiite political figure in Lebanon for decades, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under government rules. Intelligence reports identified the men as members of a newly established militant cell in Beirut that was believed to include foreigners, the official said, adding that there were suspicions that they belonged to the Islamic State inIraq and Syria, the Sunni militant group known as ISIS.

Such a plot would be a bold and dangerous escalation by ISIS, which wields extremist and sectarian ideology and brutal tactics in its drive to erase the existing nations in the region and create a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate in their place. The group’s insurgent fighters, who already control large parts of northeastern Syria, swept across northern Iraq last week, slaughtering captured Shiite soldiers and proudly broadcasting the killings on the Internet.

Spreading their attacks to Lebanon, the region’s most religiously diverse country, could intensify the destabilizing sectarian conflict. The most powerful force in the country is Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group and political party, which is allied both with Mr. Berri’s Amal movement and with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, where the chaos of a three-year insurgency has provided fertile ground for ISIS to grow. [Continue reading…]

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported: In Lebanon on Tuesday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that his forces were capable of sending fighters to Iraq to support Mr. Maliki, in comments made to As-Safir, a local newspaper sympathetic to Hezbollah. Mr. Nasrallah batted away concerns that Hezbollah is spread too thin fighting in Syria and protecting against Israel in southern Lebanon to join the fight in Iraq.

“We are ready to sacrifice martyrs in Iraq five times more than what we sacrificed in Syria, in order to protect shrines, because they are much more important than [Syria’s holy sites],” Mr. Nasrallah said.

Hezbollah justifies its presence in Syria in part by claiming that it is protecting holy sites important to Shiite Islam, particularly the Sayeda Zeinab shrine near Damascus, against groups like ISIS who seek to destroy them. The same argument has also been used by Iraqi Shiites militias and the elite Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps fighting in Syria.

The Lebanese official close to Hezbollah’s leadership, however, played down the withdrawal of Iraqi Shiite militias from Syria said. “Just as Hezbollah is prepared to fight Israel and reserve forces to fight Israel, it is prepared for Syria,” the official said. But he said Hezbollah is too occupied trying to defend against Sunni extremist groups in Syria and Lebanon to commit significant forces to Iraq.

Since last week, Hezbollah has increased security around its stronghold of Dahiyeh, a suburb of Beirut, out of concerns that ISIS gains in Iraq will inspire attacks in Lebanon, Lebanese security officials said.

Underscoring Hezbollah’s fears, ISIS recently published a map showing the group’s black flag over Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Kuwait. ISIS has been able to create a continuous state spanning Iraq and Syria with battlefield gains made over recent weeks.

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